by Ellis Avery
“I’ll write,” the rake promised. She did not, nor had I expected as much. But for a good week after, I smiled each night through the idle conversation of the Women Travelers, the rock crystal walls of their English grinding at me like teeth, gnashing my thoughts into the shape of an English tongue.
WHEN THE OLD BARBER around the corner died the next spring, I bought his house with Yukako’s gold: across the street from the brick churchyard wall, the small empty building was home to an apartment and a shop, a cat-haunted patch of weeds in back. I welcomed the silence, though it scared me. I ate when I was hungry: bread, fruit, cheese. Alone in the house, adding coal to the fire or hauling in water from the tap, I felt like I could vanish at any moment.
By September, I had not yet touched the barber’s vacant shop. I knew I ought to rent it out, and one Saturday morning after the summer heat broke, I went downstairs to give the place a good cleaning and put up a sign. I had just rolled up the heavy shutters when a hansom cab rounded the corner, led by a flock of nuns.
I understood what had happened before the cabbie began setting the cloth-wrapped boxes on the sidewalk, before the nuns reached me, brandishing the paper with my name and their address. The moment I saw the two figures in the carriage bow to each other in their seat, with just the degree of formality of two cordial strangers taking leave, I knew. My heart leapt in my chest. She must have made an English-speaking friend en route who’d helped her find me.
I stood openmouthed, still gripping the shutter handle, and it was Inko. The same narrow close-set eyes, the same reckless grin.
“You look just like yourself!” she cried. I blinked, hearing Japanese, and I bowed to her in the street. “Well, here I am,” she said. “If we get along, I thought I might stay with you, and if we don’t, I’ll go somewhere else.”
Breathless with disbelief, I looked at this woman, her rogue’s face like mine, youngish but not young. Stemmy in her Western dress, she was lean with years of work. I saw a grown woman, the decades of her hardship unknown to me, and I saw the brash, glamorous girl I’d known. The shutter handle dug into my palm; I was so happy. She cocked her head as if to take me in one eye at a time, and then her glance was a flash of color skimming over the street trees, the churchyard wall, the barbershop window. When Western-style barbers appeared in Kyoto, they set up candy-striped poles just like the ones in New York. The toko, pole, in the Japanese word for barbershop, pole-shop, was the same as the toko in tokonoma, post-room, the display alcove defined by an extra post. Dark and glittering, Inko looked from me to the barber’s pole and back, raised an eyebrow. “Say, Tokoya-han, can I have a shave?”
Shaky with joy, I nodded to the cabbie. “You can put her things in here.” I took her hard small hands. “I’ll draw you a bath,” I said.
I LOVED HER ARMS. I loved her calves. I loved her little mouth with its crooked tooth. I loved her spooling dark hair. I loved her hard brown feet and soft scant breasts. I bathed her and we made a feast of each other in the barber’s brass bed, sleeping and loving and eating apples spread with honey. As the day ebbed toward evening, a pink light stole over the white walls and I held her pillowed on my chest, drowsy in the warm air. “What are all those boxes downstairs?” I asked.
“Do you know how much all those koban were worth?” she asked. “More than enough to go and come back. So,” she inhaled, her eyes lighting. “I thought I might open a sweet shop.”
INKO UNPACKED her pots and molds and strainers into the shop downstairs and became indispensable to Japanese visitors—winning the trust of a few steady buyers in Chinatown, too—for her finely strained red bean an. Because of American immigration laws (which Inko had sidestepped thanks to Koito’s husband), there were far more men than women among the twelve thousand Chinese downtown; perhaps Inko offered them a taste of, not home, but something less far. The nationalist wave that washed me out of Kyoto kept swelling after I left: during Japan’s brutal war with China, Inko’s buyers accepted her gifts and apologies with wan thanks. They continued to place orders for her sweet bean paste, but the invitations to their New Years’ banquets dried up, never to be extended again.
Snooping her way into confectioners’ kitchens, Inko also taught herself to make chocolate—not so different, in texture, from bean paste, after all—and built a brisk trade in the neighborhood. She has become a resident curiosity, the Japanese candy lady, and with time the local children and their parents have come to add a few Japanese holidays to their own: Girls’ Day, March third, has become the Day of Free Chocolate Dolls; Boys’ Day, May fifth, has become the Day of Free Chocolate Fish. Each of her children has visited us, but none have decided to stay. Ten years ago, after a last trip to Japan, Inko began training her successor, a warm-faced young widow whose new husband runs a watch-repair stand. All our Sicilian neighbors are so surprised that poor barren Lucia remarried at all, and a Northern fellow no less, that they haven’t seemed to notice that her long-fingered Genoese is no man.
I keep the ledger for Inko’s shop, deal with English troubles when she needs me, and translate as I find work. At night, while Inko dreams on bakers’ hours, I devour books by lamplight. When I was a girl, the novels ended in marriage and the poems rhymed. The Great War changed people here as much as Meiji changed them in Japan: I am by turns baffled and delighted by the stark new cadences of the young writers. They etch the soft phrases through which I see the world into harder, tighter lines, just as today’s columnar, kimono-shaped dresses once again blunt the bustled and corseted silhouette that flattered me when I first arrived. When I finish reading, I curl into bed: Inko smells like chocolate, like the lemons she floats in our bath.
IT HAS TAKEN ME almost forty years to put words to the unhappiness of my youth; perhaps I have been granted this much time so that someday I can attempt the greater feat of describing the happiness of my middle age. But what is the form best suited to the minutiae of happiness, to its grandeur? I mean to learn it.
LAST OCTOBER, when I went to the Japanese Embassy for a client, I discovered, among the official brochures and leaflets, a long out-of-date issue of a gazette called Cloud House Monthly. My skin prickled into gooseflesh: Tai had begun printing up a leaflet for tea people, which included news of his own family. “Do you have more of these?” I asked the Embassy clerk.
YUKAKO WAS DEAD, I learned, reading at home that night. She had died some twelve years before, in 1916.
My very first response, as with almost every interaction I had with Japanese people, was embarrassment: how rude of me to think she’d never die! How selfish! My second response was surprise: how could she have succumbed to anything so petty, so ordinary, as death? And my third was a cauterized feeling where guilty regret should have been: I would never know if Yukako had forgiven me. For taking the money. For taking Nao to spite her. For wanting her more than she wanted me.
I wrote Tai a numb little letter of condolence and went out to the churchyard. I tried to summon the image of Yukako in the white cremation robe in which she’d once been married, her eyes closed, her long body rigid. I saw nothing. I felt nothing, and felt monstrous for it. My face was wet only from the wind in my eyes. The stars were small and far.
IT ARRIVED THIS MORNING, the wooden crate from Japan, just as I was finishing Virginia Woolf’s new book, Orlando, my ears abuzz with the aeroplanes her Elizabethan heroine lived so long to witness. Among the kanji brushed on all sides of the box, I found my address inked in, serifs and all, exactly as it had been printed on my stationery. Inside the crate lay a letter from Kenji, written on his brother’s behalf, conveying Tai’s best wishes and Aki’s as well. They had married after his mother’s death, and Aki had surprised them both at forty with a daughter they called Shinju: Pearl. Yukako’s suffering, Kenji said, had been intense but brief, and she had gone about dying with the same attentiveness and vigor with which she’d lived. Among the parcels she’d assembled to distribute to friends and family, she had made up a box for me, which they had accordingly kept
in storage all these years. She had said to send it with some pressed-sugar sweets and powdered tea, which he enclosed. For me.
I BEGAN OPENING my package inside, but after Kenji’s powdered matcha and the sweets, when the next thing I discovered was a whisk, it was clear Yukako had decided I should receive tea utensils. It was a soft bright day; the paulownia were in bloom. I did not want to face whatever she’d chosen for me inside.
Paulownia are kiri in Japanese; their wood is fine-grained and highly prized by cabinetworkers; they have spade-shaped leaves the size of a man’s head and regal tiered blooms in May. The tree in the churchyard formed a green canopy over me as I sat on the grass near my mother’s grave. I set out a flask of hot water, Kenji’s powdered tea, and the box of pressed-sugar wafers. He had chosen ones shaped like irises at a time when surely the plums would have been blooming, both in nature and in the shops. I was touched that he had anticipated how long it would take the sweets to reach me.
Yukako’s bundle, packed in a shallow wooden box using tied cloth in place of a lid, included a few new things: the whisk, never used, the tips of its tines still curled like petals; a pad of tea-papers; a new white linen swab; a red silk tea-cloth. And she had chosen for me the practice utensils she’d used as a girl: I recognized the plain tan teascoop, the small student’s fan, the dull-red diamond used for serving sweets, the round tray for the simplest temae. And the black lacquer tea box, the underside of whose lid I had neglected to clean so many years ago. I saw no wastewater bowl and wondered why.
The tea bowl was in a plain, unsigned box, well wrapped, of the size brought along on picnics, smaller than a tearoom bowl. I had never seen it before, but I saw, in its billowing walls and smoke-colored surface, an unconscious echo of Hakama, the bowl from the last tea held in Baishian. It must have felt like seeing a lost friend in the face of a child, to pass this tea bowl in a shop somewhere: if it gave me a frisson of recognition, all these years later, what must it have done to Yukako? With a sudden flash, I knew she had bought the bowl meaning to smash it, to silence its mocking rhyme, and then thought better of it, tucked the little piece away into storage.
And so she had made me her confidante again, after all these years. I was the one she chose to tell the story of her discomfiting day, her head turning as she passed some potter’s stall, the tea bowl leaping like an insect into her field of vision. Passing the stall twice more to find herself irritated afresh each time. Finally buying the bowl so as never to have to pass it again. Walking moodily home.
I cupped the bowl with both hands beneath the kiri tree, its leaves loud in the wind. Before filling the tea box with powdered matcha, I wiped down all the utensils with tea-papers and splashes of hot water, then laid them out as if setting up for temae. I was not surprised that Yukako had chosen not to write to me, but I still swelled with hope as I flattened the sheet of soft paper she’d wadded into the tea box, only to find that she had buried a coin in its depths, wrapped in a sheet of paper of its own. It was just the size of a five-sen piece, exactly what I’d used to buy my exotic glass of milk the day after the fire. I fingered its hard edges through the paper and shuddered with guilt and defensive anger. Was she insulting me with a few sen after all these years? I heard her voice, then, low and sneering: Are you sure that’s all you need? Don’t be shy; here, take this too.
And then I unwrapped it, black with age, the talisman that had put me, a lifetime ago, under the protection of Saint Claire.
I shook, I cried, in the green light that poured through the kiri leaves. She had held me dear for so long. I loved her, my Older Sister, the woman who had taken me under her protection, a foreign girl, a stray. I pressed the medal to my throat and took deep quavering breaths. I took a strand of the rolled-paper cord used to wrap the sweets and tied the medal around my neck.
It felt so good to weep, to feel my frozen grief start to melt, to feel the cold metal like a hole in my throat, the air pulled raw into my lungs. I filled the tea box, shaking, because it was the next thing to do, and then I arranged the tray and sweets. I could do this one thing in her memory.
I set the things I wasn’t using behind me: the tea-bowl box, Kenji’s crate, the box Yukako had packed the utensils into, still half in its carrying cloth. And then I felt metal fittings through the cotton cloth and paused to look.
It was the base of a wooden pillow. Yukako had packed the tea set into a wooden tray just like the one she’d once filled with gold coins.
I held the medal tight at my throat a long moment. Older Sister, elegant and inventive to the very end. And then I held the box in both hands, inspecting it with care. In this choice I did not discern sarcasm. Together with my medal, it bespoke generosity. It said, Yes, you took it, and I give it to you again freely. And it spoke apology: no one knew better than she, after all, that I had been unfairly blamed. On the underside of the box, inked in the tight hand of a keeper of accounts, I saw a dated column of clear brushwork. Wastewater bowl made for Shin Yukako, with wood salvaged from Baishian. I knew she’d always felt the teahouse hers. Hers for nights alone, hers to fit with glass. Hers to burn.
As I purified each utensil under that kiri dome, I felt her beside me, prodding me here and there with her fan: like so. Like so. I felt her as I had when I was small, folding her fingers around mine, her hands now as blasted with age as my own. Together we gripped the handle of the scoop with the silk cloth, together we raised and lowered the whisk, making sure the little thread knot turned full circle. When I dipped it in clear water, the tines of the whisk slowly unfurled in the tossing green light. I gently tapped tea into the bowl, hearing Yukako more with my hands than with my ears. Her voice was like light through an amber glass bottle, reciting her father’s mnemonics for each gesture. Kotsun. Kotsun. Sara sara sara sara. My body had known hers this intimately, I thought. When I lifted the tea bowl in thanks I held it much longer than necessary.
I had not tasted matcha in so long, nor tea sweets. I heard a tiny sound as the liquid saturated the dry sugar wafer on my tongue, a squeal of escaping air, and then the taste flooded me.
Sharp. Sweet. Grass. Green. That bowl of tea was all things in all places. A pivot between the living and the dead. I drank, and she was there. She told me to go. I drank again, and she was there. She sent me away. I drained the bowl, and she was there, her capacity to hurt me undimmed with time.
I packed the tea things up and left, went home to bed, and wept as if I were spitting out my heart.
AND THEN I WASHED my face, brushed down my dress, and went downstairs again, back into the May morning. Inko said she’d break for lunch and meet me at the park. I walked until I reached Reggio, the new café near Washington Square. I gave the man at the counter our flasks to fill and bought sandwiches, then waited for her on our favorite bench.
I sat with my hot coffee, sugared and foaming with milk, dunking little bites of biscotto into my flask-cup as I drank. If Yukako had given me one single-edged gift, it was this: how to love this soft air, this wash of light-flooded leaves, this sun hitting red brick, this one day in all the world.
MY HEAD JERKED UP: I heard Japanese and French. Two young flappers sat with a picnic on the bench next to mine, chatting in their cloche hats, switching between languages like darting insects, spreading butter and jam on bread. They were lovely, the French girl with her gray eyes and flushed cheeks, the Japanese girl with her cat chin and minx mouth. She giggled as she displayed a pinkie finger, the knuckle dabbed with apricot jam.
“Oh, you poor girl, just look at you,” teased the other, and then, quick as a swallow, she took the girl’s hand, caught the little knuckle in her mouth, and swiped it clean with a flick of her tongue. I almost dropped my coffee.
“You’ll get us killed, you’re so bad!” pouted the Japanese girl fondly.
I watched those two girls beside me, the very fact of them: their overlapping hands, their complicit laughter. I had never forgiven Yukako for not being in love with me. I forgave her.
A WOMAN CIRCLED the fountain selling lilacs. A girl ran to her mother, red ribbons down her back. A flock of boys winged by on bicycles. Two students tossed a book in the blue air. Nets of pigeons reeled overhead. My eyes filled; I heard bells clamor in their tower. A bee landed on my mouth and did not sting me: it sucked sweet coffee from my lower lip. I felt joy.
“HELLO, YOU,” said Inko, perching close to me. “What was in the box? This?” she asked, touching the thin rolled-paper cord around my neck. Then she spotted my mother’s medal. “The one you lost?” she breathed, taking my hand.
I nodded. “I’ll tell you everything,” I promised. “But look,” I said, glancing at the flappers. I whispered what I’d seen.
“Ara!” Inko exclaimed, grinning. Startled at the sound, the Japanese girl dropped her mesh purse at my feet, and I picked it up for her.
“Thank you.”
“It’s nothing,” I said in Japanese, and in French, “Not at all.” hey gasped audibly in concert and glanced at each other, then at Inko’s hand on mine.
“How long are you in New York?” I asked.
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